Banned Books Week is an annual awareness campaign that celebrates the freedom to read,draws attention to banned and challenged books, and highlights persecuted individuals. The United States campaign “stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them” and the requirement to keep material publicly available so that people can develop their own conclusions and opinions. The international campaign notes individuals “persecuted because of the writings that they produce, circulate or read.

#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens #16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo #17 Dracula by Bram Stoker #18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck #22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon #23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin#25 Ulysses by James Joyce #26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell#29 Candide by Voltaire#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee#31 Analects by Confucius#32 Dubliners by James Joyce#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire#38 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley #41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe #62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes #69 The Talmud#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler #75 Separate Peace by John Knowles#76 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath#77 The Red Pony by John Steinbeck#78 Popol Vuh

#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith#80 Satyricon by Petronius#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse#91 The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin #95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud#98 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau#103 Nana by Emile Zola#104 The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier #105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein #108 The Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck #109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

How many have you read??

Note: I have to admit that most of these ironically were read in school.
(And they are banned/contested in other schools?)

What an interesting list! My only thought is why isn’t Catcher in the Rye on the list? It’s one of the best books of all time (ok, mostly my opinion) and it was banned from schools and thought to be very controversial (esp because of the language) for a long time!